Edinburgh fringe roundup: twists and stick for the old boys’ club

Masculinity rather than #MeToo is a preoccupation this year, for male and female performers alike, along with race, nostalgia and Harold Wilson

With more than 3,500 different fringe shows put on for hundreds of thousands of visitors during August, it’s little wonder that Edinburgh becomes discombobulating during its festival month. The streets turn into stages – even the few tiny pockets where there is respite from the chorus of acoustic guitars, children’s entertainers or men approximating EDM on a keyboard and a bucket. Everywhere has an accent of the surreal. There’s a man with a Boots carrier bag, but he’s dressed as Margaret Thatcher. There’s a group of restless teenagers lounging around, only they’re all wearing purple and green leotards for no clear reason. There’s the real Theresa May getting into a car, booed by the public, next to a box office where she is almost certainly not picking up tickets for Jonny Woo’s All Star Brexit Cabaret, even though she might find that less farcical than the fiasco she currently faces.

There’s a cacophony of hard sells from the people with flyers – devoted, tenacious and unimaginably enthusiastic, there only for the love – who thrust leaflets into hands as they yell words seemingly flung together at random. In a metre or so of walking, enough to take only a few steps, I heard “trippy New Zealand stoner shit” and “comedy techno noir”, as if we’d all agreed only to speak in magnetic poetry. “Do you like dark comedy, and how social media keeps feeding you lies?” one woman asked, to which I’m still considering an answer.

It took Kieran Hodgson two years to turn an argument with his mum about their opposing Brexit views into ’75 (Pleasance Beneath), but it was worth the wait. Combining impressions of 1970s politicians with a deep dive into Britain’s divisive 1975 European Community membership referendum and a recurring question about shifting class allegiances might sound like a queasy combination, but Hodgson’s quick wit and passion for Harold Wilson’s vocal tics shone a new light on surprisingly relevant details of 70s Britain.

One might have thought this would be the era of #MeToo-inspired material, but perhaps in the aftermath of Hannah Gadsby’s all-conquering and last-word-ish Nanette, most performers seem to have thought better of addressing it head-on. Masculinity crops up repeatedly though, chewed over and twisted into clever, questioning shapes by both men and women. Natalie Palamides’s Laid was a hit in 2017, but this year, at the Pleasance Beside, she is Nate, a rugged, unreconstructed kind of fella who forces the audience to ask themselves deeply unsettling questions about consent. It’s brutal, outrageous, next-level clowning, and made me extremely wary of the front row for the rest of my time at the fringe, if not for all eternity.

I left Nate smelling cheap men’s shower gel in my hair, and walked straight over to Summerhall’s Square Go, in which one of the characters, Max, sprays Lynx around with abandon. The old cliche that comedy is a boys’ club may be on its way out, but for an early evening, it still smelled like one. Square Go is a cunningly sparse two-hander by Kieran Hurley and Gary McNair that soaks the audience in witty nostalgia as two teenagers prepare for a schoolyard scrap, cheered on and buoyed up by the crowd, until they start to ask why they can’t just talk, instead. The score is by members of Frightened Rabbit (whose singer Scott Hutchison recently died), which adds extra poignancy to an already touching production.

Cora Bissett’s What Girls Are Made Of (Traverse) is nostalgia of a different flavour, a rowdy, rousing memoir-cum-gig about the reality of life as a 17-year-old girl in a hotly tipped indie band in the early 90s, and what comes after it inevitably falls apart. It’s effortlessly joyful, as is Bissett’s performance, and it has a gentle pop at Radiohead’s poshness that cannot fail to please.

There’s a similar respect for the strength and power of teen-girl resilience in Rose Matefeo’s charming Horndog, at the Pleasance Above, which rips through growing up on the internet and argues, quite convincingly, that romcoms may be more damaging than porn.

For all of the feelgood productions, there were plenty that seethed and raged and challenged the audience to get furious along with them. Lung, the documentary theatre company behind Chilcot, debuted Trojan Horse at Summerhall, based on the controversial inquiry into an alleged Islamist plot to take over schools in Birmingham in 2014. Its script was sculpted from more than 200 hours of interviews with 90 witnesses, and despite an occasionally nervous performance, it’s powerfully abrasive, infuriating and hard to forget. The same could be said of Underground Railroad Game, a Traverse theatre coup and the UK premiere of the New York smash that throws race, history, education, sex and power into the spotlight under the guise of a school project. Its creators, Jennifer Kidwell and Scott R Sheppard, also star, and it’s fantastically fearless and damning, the kind of theatre that is improved by having no idea what punches it will throw, and when. Hardly anyone said a word on the way out.

On my final night at the fringe, the buzz started to hum, loudly. A fear of missing Australian absurdist Sam Campbell’s The Trough dragged me to the Monkey Barrel at gone midnight. The place was packed with other comedians; Campbell was, in this moment, the hottest of tickets. After a few days of tearing through theatre and standup, endurance-style, it’s easy to start to spot recurring themes: the NHS at 70; a sense of apology for being straight and white and male; and dream catchers, oddly enough. To top it all off with Campbell, resistant to any category, theme, issue or otherwise, just scattergun hilarity, perfect nonsense, silliness for the sake of being silly, was a true delight.

Seven more shows to see

Thor and Loki (Assembly Roxy)There’s a choice of superhero-inspired stuff this year (here’s looking at Vulvarine), but this is more Norse myth than Marvel homage. A joyous musical about identity, self-worth and generational conflict, packed with snappy gags.

Alex Edelman: Just for Us (Pleasance Cabaret Bar)The one-time best newcomer returns with added maturity in this exquisitely crafted, deliciously funny story about a Jewish man who decides to hang out with some Nazis.

Toast (Traverse)Nigel Slater’s memoirs have already been adapted for the small screen. Now they get a whimsical stage treatment, with added lemon meringue treats for the audience.

Micky Overman: Role Model (Pleasance Bunker Two)Overman is Dutch with an Irish and Canadian accent, and this, her fringe debut, is a pin-sharp torrent of precision gags and delightfully silly one-liners about sex, self-esteem and being the nanny to a teenage girl.

Catherine Bohart: Immaculate(Pleasance Bunker Two)She’s the bisexual daughter of a Catholic deacon with OCD, so she has plenty to go on… Bohart charms with this debut about family ties, illness and how annoying it is when your parents make themselves at home.

Ivo Graham: Motion Sickness(Pleasance Cabaret Bar)Amiable, pleasingly straightforward riffs from the old Etonian (it’s his USP) on the anxieties of getting engaged, starting a family and giving up hangovers.

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